Piper Knife

A few years back, I did a post regarding the Cape/SoAfrican knife style, Piper. Rather than rehash that, go here and read my post and the subsequent back and forth. It got quite lively.

To get information directly from those who know, go here. There are also several vids on YouTube; Mushtaq has this, and Bobbe Edmonds has posted some useful material about the art on his blog.

Recently, I was sent a copy of a short, basic e-book, Piper: Cape Knife Fighting Techniques, by Hans-Erik Petermann, available here. 'Twas a freebie, offered because Erik likes my Matador novels, and I appreciate the gesture.

Petermann, listed as a Master Guardian of the Piper System, along with ranks in other arts, has produced a concise, readable, no-nonsense primer on Piper basics, starting with the legality of carrying a knife, a history of the art, and moving into an illustrated how-to for the basic movements. The photographs are clear (and illustrative,) and the philosophy that permeates the book is by and large common sense. It covers hand-, footwork, and body angles.

The core movements are simple, straight-forward, proven-effective, and the advanced stuff is apparently built using combinations of these, which is a plus in martial arts: Simple is better. The more complex a series of fighting motions are, the more likely they are to come apart under pressure.

"Simple" is not necessarily "easy," of course, but that's not the point.

Knife players from different systems are, naturally, going to disagree about the wielding of things edged. There are a couple of things in the material that raise my eyebrows, one of which is the "Flying Chest Pass."

Swapping the knife from one hand to the other is possible, and sometimes necessary. Being able to use a weapon with your weak hand if something happens to your strong hand is a good skill to have. Petermann offers four such transfers, one of which looks reasonable to me; the chest-pass, however, strikes me as something you wouldn't risk without a shitload of practice -- years -- and even then, I have to wonder how well it would work during an adrenaline storm.

Petermann is quick to point out that the FCP isn't his favorite technique, either, and I'm glad to hear that. I'd have left it out of a basics text altogether and stuck to the one that seems the safest, the "Forearm Wiping Pass." Being able to do that smoothly would offer a nasty surprise to somebody expecting to block a right-hand attack suddenly on the receiving end of a left-handed one. And one never loses contact with the knife doing it this way.

Piper favors the icepick grip, though Petermann mentions saber in passing. This isn't a real problem for me, since we like the reverse grip, too, but I'd like to see a bit more on the saber-hold -- it does have some advantages. Saber might be the way you come up with the knife in a hurry and switching grips is like passing the knife from hand-to-hand -- one mistake, and you are unarmed. I switch grips all the time when I'm fooling around, but in a real encounter, that might get iffy. The Fight-or-Flight Syndrome, and its associated tachypsychia, tends to rob you of small muscle control as it reroutes resources to the haul-ass or kick-ass major muscle groups. You need to be relaxed enough so such a thing doesn't happen, and that needs a skill and experience level beyond hormones. There are players who can do this, but they aren't beginners.

Any kind of juggling with your weapon during a life-or-death encounter strikes me as an extremely high-risk move. Dropping your knife at the wrong moment could be a fatal error.

Learning an art from a book or vid, as I have pointed out, is not the best way; on the other hand, if you are curious about a fighting system that mostly lives halfway around the world, hands-on teachers might be hard to come by.

Piper has, because of its youth and criminal roots, sparked a great deal of controversy in the martial arts world. Traditional martial arts featuring the blade sometimes look askance upon Piper and say so. What I see in it has evolved since I first saw a grainy video of it back in 2001 -- and that was scary enough. There's no question that it works, because it came from people who routinely killed folks using it. In South Africa, the Piper folks have a standing invitation to traditionalists who want to test their skills, and apparently, there isn't a waiting line.

Is Piper unbeatable? I don't see that. But I have pointed out over and over, high, wide, and one more time, that a trained knifer in your face is not going to be a walk in the park no matter who you are, and your best bet is to be down the hall and around the corner when the sharps come out. Steel beats flesh.

I don't know the internal politics of Piper, so whether Erik's book has the unqualified approval of Nigel February, the man who codified the prison assassination stuff into a system, and that of his seniormost student, Lloyd de Jongh, I can't say. The book delivers what it claims -- a brief introduction to the core basics of a nasty, unique, and workable knife system. It is well-written, and for those who have never seen Piper, will be an eye-opener. Go to YouTube and watch a couple of the videos and see what you think. There are some follow-up reports that are included with the main text, including interviews with Nigel and Lloyd. I'm assuming if they didn't approve of the book, they'd be disinclined to allow those to be used. There is also a link to Erik's site from the Piper main page, and vice-versa. (Editor's note: Some clarifying emails show that these three men seem to get along just fine, and that the #3 guy -- Erik -- in the system got approval from the two above him as the book was being done.)

I think Piper: Cape Knife Fighting Techniques, is worth having in your library if you are a knife player, or just curious about a system with a different spin.

Note: The e-book wasn't available for Mac download, but now is, and your OS needs to be specified when ordering. It comes with the e-Book Pro Reader, and that doesn't allow for a print out or copying -- you'll have to read it on a computer screen or a reader that uses this software, and you are limited to two units.

Cut and Run

There is a South African style of knifefighting called "Piper." That's their logo above. Much of it, as I understand, is derived from prison-based material, and from actual assassins -- that is, stuff that really worked on the street well enough to get them put away for murder.

Lot of folks get carved up in SoAfrica. Knowing how to use a knife there is a survival characteristic.

It is pretty scary stuff to look at.

Rather than try to explain it here, I'll give you a direct link: Piper Knife Combatives

Go and have a look. You can also get reviews of the system by Mushtaq Ali and Bobbe Edmunds, over in my link list. (Traceless Warrior and Thick as Thieves, respectively). And I'm going to put a link to Piper in my list, too.

I first saw a garage tape of some the senior Piper players back in 2001. It looked nasty, but I saw some holes in it. A couple years ago, when I wrote my martial arts science fiction novel The Musashi Flex, I started the book with a knife fight. One of the fighters used a style called "Peepah," which was based on Piper. He got carved up by my protagonist Mourn, who was a galactic-class fighter and expert in a lot of martial arts.

Peepah/Piper didn't come off in the best of lights. Part of this was that I had seen but one old tape I used as a reference. Part of it was because my protagonist was an expert used to fighting to the death and had managed to survive twenty-five years doing it. (And if he lost, it was gonna be a really short novel ...)

Naturally, the senior students/creators of the Piper system weren't particular thrilled with how their art came off -- especially since they had been getting a lot of crap from traditional martial artists who disdained it. If you want to see really ugly politics and in-fighting, martial arts schools are the places to go. (We all say that there is no one perfect martial art -- but in our hearts, we all believe that whichever one we do comes the closest ...)

I re-visited Piper, saw some more recent vids, and noted that it was much improved from my original exposure. Not perfect -- I still see things I think an expert with a knife could exploit against Piper -- but it looks more coherent, is still evolving, and no two ways about it, has some really bad-ass stuff. A lot of traditional martial arts knife defenses simply won't work against these guys.

So I'm here to point that out. These guys have something, and if they continue to refine it, it's going to be as good a knife system as any, and better than most.

I still think Mourn could win -- he cheated after all, and that's a big part of his (and my) art. But I expect that he'd likely get cut in the doing of it. The old Javanese saying has it: In a knife fight, the loser is ashes, but the winner is charcoal ...

And there is your mayhem content for the day ...

Walk the Walk

Regular readers of ye olde blogge will recall I have mentioned from time-to-time in a favorable light the SoAfrican knife art, Piper. The most recent posting was a review of Eric Petermann's book on Piper's basics, which I found to be well-done and worth getting.

If you couldn't drop by a class in South Africa, I said, this book would be as close as you could get, and enough to get a taste of what certainly seems to me be one of the nastier knife arts out there. It gets right to the heart of sharps, and while pieces of it look passing familiar to those of us in silat or kali, it's different. The rhythms aren't the same.

There are some videos on YouTube, and if you watch them, you'll see some stuff that is very interesting in terms of movement.

Well, turns out that in my review I was right -- and wrong. The book is good, but Lloyd de Jongh, one of the system's founders, (under Nigel February), is coming to the U.S., where he will be giving at least one public seminar, and possibly others. So you will be able to see it first-hand.

This seminar is going to be in San Diego -- La Mesa -- at a dance studio, 8241 La Mesa Blvd. on Saturday, May 22nd, starting at 1 p.m.

I would love to do this, but am up to my ass in literary alligators all full of ticking clocks, and won't be able to make it -- though if I lived in SoCal, I would probably steal the time anyhow.

If you are a serious knife guy and have any interest in seeing what all the hoopla is about and you can get there? You should consider it. I can't help but believe it will be most educational.

Lloyd will post updates on his blog, and you can contact him via the link there.

Lot of folks around the country, it's a long haul, but it's only a couple hours from L.A., and Lloyd is also going to be spending a bit of time in the Simi Valley, which is an even shorter drive.

This is the first opportunity people in the U.S. will have to see a master of this art here. If you play with sharps and want to see how a culture from a different part of the world than SE Asia expresses things with their blades? Go check it out.

Guilty Pleasure

Most of my TV guilty pleasures are on basic cable–there are a slew of programs on places like TNT, FX, A&E and USA, summer-starts designed to catch all the folks looking for something after the traditional networks go into reruns: Leverage, The Glades, Memphis Beat, Royal Pains, White Collar, Rissoli and Isles, The Closer, In Plain Sight. Some of these are outright goofy, some not bad, and in the case of Justified, which is done for the season, as good as anything else on the non-pay-cable tube. 


Probably we enjoy Memphis Beat the most of the current crop. Great character actors and music, and while it's about as accurate a cop show as Barney Miller used to be, you gotta love Jason Lee's portrayed of Dwight, the too-honest-for-his-own-good detective. That's Keb Mo doing music behind Lee on last week's episode.


The latest of these to catch our attention is Covert Affairs, centered around a newbie CIA operative, Annie Walker, played by Piper Perabo. This one is in the comic-book fantasy category, since Annie didn't even get through her training before they sent her into the field, and she makes James Bond look like a dullard on tranquilizers. 


Silly? Aside from the fact that Annie's control, Auggie, is blind, that she does all kinds of illegal crap by working inside the continental USA, a thing expressly forbidden to the CIA, and that there doesn't seem to be anything that MacGyver could do that she can't do backwards and in high heels? The idea that they'd be trusting her on some of the missions still wet-behind-the ears is worth a lot of outright mirth.


She can handle it, her supervisors say, as they nod sagely.


Yeah, yeah, the electronic gadgets and real-time spycams and other instant-gratification gear are a given, if not on the same gosh-wom level of sci fi as Leverage. That Annie's sister and her boyfriend think she works for the Smithsonian Museum kind of keeps a B-story going, but it's approaching lame. 


Last episode, Annie and her boss–right, her boss at Langley goes into the field–plus an ex-boyfriend travel to Mexico disguised as a TV crew to rescue some hostages, including an undercover CIA female op. The scene where the undercover op and Annie's boss beat the crap out of four guards armed with submachine guns, now that was believable, yessir ...


Oh, well. That's what a guilty pleasure is, isn't it ... ?

Figure of Speech

Okay, so Sunday morning my wife and I and the younger dog went with my son and daughter-in-law and our three grandsons on a Buddy Walk for the newest grandson, Nate, who has Downs Syndrome. Lot of folks marched, leaving and returning to Millennium Park, in Lake Oswego.

Among the group was a bagpiper, and as we were finishing up, Dal got the picture above. It's one of the organizers, writing a check, and ...

paying the piper ...

More on Literary Piracy

Since this has sparked some comment, maybe a bit more on how I view it.


There are two contrasting concepts in law I sometimes hold up, malum prohibitum and malum in se. The first means that a thing is bad simply because it breaks a law and isn't intrinsically evil itself. The second says the act is bad in and of itself.


In theory, laws are passed to protect people, usually from other people. Laws that protect sane adults from themselves? Not necessary. If all sexual positions except missionary are illegal and a pair of consenting adults want to do it dog-style, whose fucking business (pun intended) is that? Not the legislature's. 


Protecting the kids? Sure. Protecting somebody who doesn't want to do it dog-style and who is forced to do it? Absolutely. Mutually-agreed upon, no harm, no foul? Get outta town.


My belief is that laws should be drafted to protect people against the unjustified initiation of force. This doesn't just include direct physical force, but actions against persons and property that cost the victim time, money, bruises, or blood.  


These get parsed differently, usually by how dangerous and how wicked a criminal act is. If you rob a bank with a note says you have a bomb, it is armed robbery whether you have the bomb or not, because the threat is there. Penalty for that is worse than if you break into the place at night when nobody is home and burgle the vault.


Breaking into an account online and stealing money from it? Same penalty as the hands-on real-time burglary, at least in theory. Surely you can see why? 


If I had a hundred bucks in my account and you cleaned it out, the money is just as gone either way. Theft is theft; mine, you took it without permission, you are a thief. 


Guy points a gun at you and takes your wallet? There's a law against that, and because armed robbery is, by most moral codes in most of the world, considered a bad thing. Malum in se.


Murdering grannies and children hither and yon? Rape? Slavery? Assault?  Malum in se.


Running the stop sign at three a.m. on a Tuesday when you can see for a mile in any direction and you know no traffic is coming? Malum prohibitum. Yep, the law is designed to protect folks at the intersection, but nobody is there but me? Where's the harm?


If some yahoo down in Chigger Bite, Louisiana, gets the city council to pass a law that says you can't sing Rolling Stones songs on Tuesday? Malum prohibitum. (Maybe Lady GaGa is Malum in se ...)


In these cases, however silly, there laws against those acts. And if you break those laws, there is a chance you'll have to pay the piper if you get caught, however much you disagree with it. 


We all break laws all the time. Some unintentionally. Some because we aren't aware of them. Some because we don't agree with 'em. Some because we are willing to risk the penalty for whatever reasons. Maybe some of us are evil overlords.


If I run the stop sign, then I substitute my judgement for the traffic law's. They say I should stop at that intersection, I didn't see any reason that I should. But: maybe the next guy hasn't gotten his glasses checked lately, and he doesn't see the old lady on the bicycle out for a night ride because she has insomnia, and he runs over her.


Oops.


Is he at fault? Yes. If granny was wearing her ninja outfit and almost invisible in the dark, he's at much as fault as if she were lit up like a Christmas tree: He ran the sign. The jury might take that into account, the clothes, but the driver did the crime, he has to be willing to do the time.


Copyright law says that the author has the right to distribute copies of his/her work. That's because the law recognizes intellectual property as a right, at least most places in the world.


If  the author rents those rights out, fine. If somebody starts printing up copies and selling them sans permission, most people can see that such an act is wrong. But so many of those same folks don't see that copying the book and sending it out an an e-file is just as wrong, especially in this day when electronic books are becoming the norm. By so doing, you decrease the potential buyer pool.


It's not about whether you make profit personally. Rob a bank and give the money to widows and orphans? You are a bank robber with heart, but still a bank robber. Maybe the jury cuts you some slack, but don't bet the farm on it.


Okay, duping a file and emailing to a few friends is not robbing a bank. But, consider the classic grape example. You go into the store, you are in the produce section, buying veggies and fruit. You see some nice grapes, you pluck one from a bunch you aren't planning to buy and eat it. Big deal, one grape. Safeway ain't gonna go bankrupt. You are about to spend eighty bucks on groceries.


If, however, a thousand shoppers each eat a grape, it is a bigger deal. 


If you pluck that grape from those you are planning to buy, you can justify that, right? 


But isn't it the same? If the grapes are sold by weight, it's a few grams light at the register. BFD, right?


 If a thousand folks do that,  it's a few thousand grams, and that makes it pounds. And if this happens day in, day out, such tiny pilferage gets to be a big factor in a market where the profit margins are 2% or 3%.


Had a market close here locally recently because shoplifting apparently cut so much into the margin the place started losing money. 


If everybody who goes to the park picks one flower, pretty soon the shrubs are bare.


Have I swiped stuff this way? Yes. But I knew when I did it that it was wrong. I didn't try to justify it as perfectly all right to make myself feel better about it. 


Hey, everybody does it. They can afford it. It's not all that much. It's a write-off. I'm not really part of the problem, but part of the solution, if you think about it–I'll tell folks how good the grapes are at Safeway, they'll sell more.


Uh huh. These are all things to make you feel better about doing something that you know is wrong. If you are gonna do it anyway, fine, I understand. Been there, swiped that, I don't believe that the little sins send you to Hell.


Just don't try and pretend it is an act of virtue. 


It isn't.